This invention relates to the art of meat slicing, and in particular to a high-volume device of the rotary blade type for producing strips of meat from boned meat parts such as chicken breasts.
The many devices available today for slicing meat in volume are in general complex and therefore expensive to manufacture. As with this invention, numerous devices exist employing plural circular blades mounted upon, and spaced along, a common axis, to produce strips of meat. The meat portions may be passed to the blades by means of endless belt conveyors.
Prior inventors have addressed two problems peculiar to multiple-disc slicers: (a) that of forcing the meat cut toward, and thus between, the blades, and (b) that of preventing meat between the blades from remaining therebetween for a complete rotation of the blades, and thus accumulating in the apparatus.
One way of solving the first of the above problems is to position plural pressure wheels opposite the blades, the pressure wheels ordinarily having gaps between them which permit the peripheries of the cutting blades to enter, so that the blades and pressure wheels become somewhat interdigitated. Ordinarily, the pressure wheels and cutter blades are affixed on respective, parallel shafts at identical intervals, to insure that the blades and wheels will remain in proper lateral registration.
We have found that, by mounting the cutter blades and the pressure wheels loosely on their shafts, assembly, disassembly and cleaning are greatly facilitated, without detriment to the efficiency of the cutter. In fact, it appears that an apparatus so constructed is actually superior in performance to that of devices constructed with tighter fits. The components for our apparatus are also simpler to manufacture that in prior devices.
This invention also deals with the problem of separating the meat cuts from an endless conveyor, such as a horizontal belt used to transport the cuts from an upstream apparatus to the cutter blades. Under the action of both gravity and surface adhesion, the cuts tend to remain on the conveyor, and so it is necessary to encourage the meat cuts to stay with the blades until they are forced to do so by the pressure wheels just downstream of the conveyor. One approach in the past has been to make the conveyor actually a series of parallel webs, so that the cutting blades could penetrate between them; this approach, however, results in greater cleaning problems, and more opportunity for conveyor failures.